A rabbinic perspective on contemporary Jewish issues with a special focus on the world of the literary.

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Preaching in the Post-Sermon Age

For anyone
interested in understanding more deeply the trajectory of American values and
American culture, Charles Murray’s newest book, Coming Apart, is an
important text. Murray argues that over the past 50 years, two utterly
disparate classes have emerged from the once monochrome American landscape.
Those who belong to the upper class overwhelmingly attend a certain set of
colleges, marry one another and live in enclaves, removed and apart from people
unlike them. Meanwhile, the core values that form the backbone of this upper
class – marriage, industriousness, honesty and religion – are eroding
precipitously among the lower class.

These
discrepancies in values have produced alarming trends. While only seven percent
of children among the upper class are born out of wedlock, the number is a
staggering 45 percent when it comes to the lower class. The employment gap is
yawning. And people described as lower class pursue education less vigorously
and tend to be far less active contributors to their local communities.

More and more,
America is dividing along class lines and the members of these respective
classes are becoming increasingly ignorant about the lives of people unlike
themselves.

In one of the
most provocative segments of the book, Murray asks the reader to take a
self-graded survey to establish how much exposure one has to the world that is
not her own. Think about your own answers to questions such as these:

·Since leaving
school, have you ever worn a uniform?

·Have you ever
walked on a factory floor?

·Have you ever
had a close friend who could seldom get better than Cs in high school even if
he or she tried hard?

With a plethora of data to support his arguments, Murray’s case is
compelling and his diagnosis is sobering.

By his own
admission, Murray’s agenda is descriptive rather than prescriptive. But in
considering paths toward rectifying what has gone wrong, he alludes to two
phenomena that are worth thinking about through the lens of Jewish values.

First, there is
the problem in terms of isolationism. As Murray writes, Members of the upper
class are woefully out of touch with their lower class counterparts. Contact
between these two communities is simply too infrequent.

Any
prescription that speaks to this issue surely has to include a formula for
bringing different kinds of people together. The Jewish tradition ensures this
happens organically by casting as wide a net as possible.

For devout
practitioners with communal conscience, daily obligations mean regular contact
with people outside one’s immediate social circles. While Jewish history is
rife with the establishment of charitable societies and institutions for the
promulgation of Jewish values, individual duties in Jewish law cannot be
outsourced. Simply put, there is no substitute for personal involvement.
Mitzvot like visiting the sick; comforting the bereaved; lifting up the widow,
orphan and stranger; or inviting guests into one’s home are obligations that
demand a constant and ongoing degree of contact with people who are by
definition in another state.

For those who
are affiliated but less rigorously committed, it is in the realm of worship
that one is meant to gain exposure to people of different life stages and
backgrounds. Synagogue demographics may be influenced by geography, but esteem
and honor in the congregation is awarded based on virtue: Those who privilege
study, charity and personal piety are accorded honor, further obscuring
potential distinctions of caste.

And for those
who attach to the Jewish story only a few times a year, it will be the holidays
that help individuals clear the hurdles of class difference. In Temple times,
all Jews living in the Jewish state, irrespective of class, were enjoined to
make three annual pilgrimages to Jerusalem.

The vision was
that all Jews would celebrate their holiday as a single community. And while
this practice is essentially outmoded, its ethic remains very much alive. For
it was the contemporary equivalent of an economy class community retreat. Find
ways for people to leave their natural habitats and their natural comfort zones
and, in the course of things, they will find the human ties that bind
them.

Short of
demanding day-to-day civic involvement on the part of its citizens, one could
envision numerous ways to encourage the coming together of the divided American
classes Murray so aptly describes. David Brooks has suggested a post-high school
year of mandatory national service. Think of the benefits of Teach for America
– both for the students and the teachers. Another thought is to develop ways to
intelligently improve and integrate the public school system. In the
“SuperZips” Murray describes, many public schools are highly regarded and
considered perfectly viable alternatives to expensive private schools. The
trick would be to maintain high academic standards while absorbing a meaningful
minority of children coming from lower class backgrounds.

Either of these
propositions would surely represent a step in the right direction. The second,
and much tougher nut to crack, however, is the challenge of mobilizing the
upper class and encouraging its rank and file to preach what they practice. In
this age, the ethic of non-judgmentalism predominates. As a result, the elite
are generally unwilling to tell others what they really think.Members of the upper class know what works
for them, but say to themselves, “Who are we to tell others what is virtuous?”

The rabbis,
too, are leery about the efficacy of moralizing. While the Torah commands:
Rebuke your neighbor, the Talmud is quick to point to the words that
immediately follow: but do not bear a sin because of him. The rabbis propose
that the second clause qualifies the first. One must be absolutely certain that
his well-intentioned rebuke does not encroach on the wrongdoer’s dignity. While
there is a place for dogmatism, there is also a place for sensitivity. For one
engaged in the virtuous act of reproach, discretion is an even higher virtue.

Whatever the
principle, in practice Murray is certainly right to have identified that we
live in a post-sermon culture. As Leon Wieseltier recently put it, “We believe
that truth is a form of hegemony. We suspect that pluralism may require
perspectivism, or at least a denial of the possibility of objectivity. We wish
to be right without anybody else being wrong.” Outside the Ultra-Orthodox
community, this sentiment is particularly prevalent even among teachers and
rabbis, whose task would have once been described in terms of conveying truths.
Today, they use a vocabulary of encouraging, persuading, inspiring and perhaps
influencing their congregants or students. Preaching is out of vogue.

Perhaps over
time the pendulum will swing again and those possessed of good values and good
ideas will gain the self-confidence to share them with others. In the meantime,
we would do well to recall the words that were among the last Moses taught to
his people: Remember the days of old, consider the years of ages past; ask your
father, he will inform you, your elders, they will tell you. That there will be
voices of wisdom and sage counsel is a given. But the verse presupposes its
readers will have relationships with those wise men and women such that when
the time comes, they will be able to access them and learn the lessons of
history and experience.

If we want to
start bridging the values gap in this great country, the answer is not to
re-learn the art of effective preaching. The answer is to re-learn the art of
effective relationship building. The upper class does not need to preach more;
it needs to reach out more. Our day-to-day lives are filled with dozens of
transactional relationships. Think of the clerks, the tellers, the maintenance
staff, the drivers, the doormen, the delivery boys and the receptionists.
Imagine if we transformed even one of these into a meaningful relationship. The
capacity to preserve American exceptionalism is in our hands. Opportunities
abound. All we need to do is seize them.